Why secular ethics is superior to religious ethics

As an atheist I usually have to face an iteration of the without-god-there'd-be-no-morals argument. My usual tactic in handling such arguments has been based on Hitchens famous challenge: show me one moral action that an atheist cannot engage in. Now, I'm taking a bit of a different approach. While sticking to the challenge, I take it a step further, by not only asserting that secular ethics is in fact attainable, but by stating that it is superior to its religious counterpart.

There are some schools of thought in moral philosophy that judge moral actions by their consequences only. I partially endorse this thinking, by merging it with the other schools of thought that judge the morality of an action also by the intentions behind it. Consequences and intentions, in my opinion, are both necessary to determine the moral standing of an action or principle.

Based on this I assert that secular morals, derived from our adherence to a set of principles are superior to religious ones, derived out of fear of punishment or promises of rewards in the afterlife. Why? Instead of writing out the theory, let me illustrate through a simple example.

Imagine, if you will, two persons which are presented with an opportunity to steal something in a store. Neither chooses to steal. The first does so because he's afraid he'll get caught and punished. The second does so because she believes that stealing someone else's property is wrong. Both people engaged, or more precisely failed to engage, in the same exact act with the same exact result. They did not steal. However, we'd all intuitively say that the second person's act is more moral than the first person's act, who did not steal only because he was afraid of punishment, if caught. It is a conclusion that requires no discussion; I'd say almost all of us would instinctively deem the second person as more moral than the first. I mean, given a choice of having either one of them as a roommate, who would you choose? I for one would go with the second, and not only because she happens to be female in this example.

The point of this little exercise is that intentions matter in morality. They can add, or take away, from the total moral score of an action. Good intentions add to it; bad ones take away points. As such, a set of morals based on principles, will always be superior to a set of morals based on fear of punishment/promise of reward, even if both moral sets are exactly the same and result in identical actions. The former is descriptive of secular ethics; the former is descriptive of religious ethics. As such secular ethics is superior to religious ethics.

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"We are each free to believe what we want, and it's my view that the simplest explanation is: There is no god. No one created the Universe, and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; there is probably no heaven and no afterlife, either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the Universe. And for that, I am extremely grateful." -- Professor Stephen Hawking, cosmologist